Dances with Avatars

[altivo]

OK, we finally saw Avatar last night. It was OK, but no more than that. Of course most of you know that I'm not a movie fan anyway, and it takes a very precise sort of thing to actually excite me. This film was not it. In its favor: It does not suffer from the "need" to have an explosion or gunfire take place at least once every five minutes, like so many popular films today. (I walked out on Firefly for that reason. I have no interest in such silliness.) Not in its favor: In the last 40 minutes or so, it makes up for the lack of explosions and gunfire in the rest of the film. Boo. Also, when the credits rolled I recognized the similarity to the 1990 film Dances With Wolves. Almost an identical story line, just set in the American West at the time of the Indian Wars (for those of you who don't remember it.) To be quite honest, I prefer the older film. But in fact, I prefer the book on which the older film was based to the film itself. This is usual for me.

I'm left puzzled as to why so many seemed to think Avatar is a "furry film." I certainly didn't see it. Yes, the Na'vi have tails. No, they aren't furry in my perception, just alien. Sympathetic, perhaps, but alien. Even though the anti-corporate/anti-government/anti-military slant of the film does seem to fit with my opinions on same, and in fact isn't nearly as strong a message on those as I'd like to see become popular, it holds little appeal for me. I had avoided reviews and commentary on the film precisely because I didn't want to see spoilers. Consequently, I had only the vaguest idea of what was coming, and no idea that anyone else had associated the storyline with Dances With Wolves. I was quite amused when I looked it up after seeing it and found that many have made the same association and that James Cameron himself admits that Kevin Costner's 1990 award-winning film was "one of his references" while making Avatar.

Now, reviving last week's topic just briefly: the PI saga is not yet done. I revised my code to gain some efficiencies, and finally figured out how to get FORTRAN on the Alpha to use an internal floating point format 128 bits long (16 bytes, as opposed to half that for normal "double precision" arithmetic.) This improved my precision but slowed the calculation of results. On the Alpha DS10, it took about 5 hours to integrate the curve in ten billion slices. I ran a 100 billion slice version over the weekend, and it took 30 hours to complete after the efficiency tuning was added.

Results were accurate to 15 decimal places, a new high for me. The next step up might take 300 hours to run, though, so I don't know if I'm going to try.

PI to 15 decimal places is: 3.141 592 653 589 793

Oh, and I didn't get the photos from yesterday's cold and gloomy hiking uploaded yet. I will do it, though.

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

People keep saying that it has similarities to a LOT of other different stories. But all those other stories are not all the same as each other, so something is wrong with those comparisons.

Maybe it is like something that seems familiar, even though it isn't. And maybe that's why so many people liked it?

[altivo]

Well, different viewers or readers do see very different things in the same film or book. I like Tolkien and have read most of his work, including several times through The Lord of the Rings yet what I enjoyed in that long tale seems to be precisely what many others hated. And what many others liked, including apparently Peter Jackson and the screenwriters who did the film version, is precisely the parts in which I have very little interest. Jackson's film interpretation seemed, especially in the third film, to be a totally different book from the one I know.

Avatar probably does share common elements with a number of other films and perhaps books (though I believe it was written entirely for the screen and not based on any novel.) What I personally saw and appreciated in the film, though, is an echo of the story in Dances With Wolves: fighter for the more powerful invader becomes a double agent and then turns native and fights against his own people in an attempt to preserve the rights and way of life of the native race who are being oppressed. There are probably dozens of stories like that. In cinematic terms, though, the Costner film was the one that surfaced in my mind. My exposure to film is not that of a film buff. As I often admit, I don't much care for the medium and tend to see relatively few movies overall. I had no idea that so many others had said much the same thing, though.

The Last Avatar

[moonhare]

I finally got this through the library and found it to be entertaining. I knew nothing about the movie other than some comments made about racism, so I was able to watch the film without misleading disinformation (a.k.a. trailers) affecting my thoughts. I didn't hear of a furry slant, and maybe it was the tails or those cute horse-like ears.

Tom Cruise's Last Samurai was the only parallel that crossed my mind when watching this, only without the final annihilation.

Re: The Last Avatar

[altivo]

I didn't see Last Samurai at all, so couldn't make any connections with it. I've seen Dances With Wolves at least twice. ;p

The people who raved about Avatar being a film "every furry must see" referred usually to the Na'vi as "seven foot tall blue cat people." I guess the ears and yellow eyes, and perhaps the shape of the nose, made them think of cats. I found neither the appearance nor the behavior of the Na'vi very catlike, however. Their culture and behaviors did, however, resemble those of native American peoples, right down to the shamanistic spiritual advisor and the weaponry and use of horse-like mounts. The macho "warrior brave" attitude of young males fit that archetype perfectly.